Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @11:31PM
from the consider-yourself-reported dept.

schliz writes "Internet users could contribute to an official blacklist of suspected terrorist content under a budding 'Clean IT' project, backed by the European Commission. Participating governments are putting together 13 proposals in a text that commits web hosts, search engines and ISPs to helping to weed out content that incites acts of terror. From the article: 'Among those 13 courses of action is a proposal for a system that will allow users to "flag" content they believe to be illegal when surfing the web. These alarms would be sent for review to the service provider and in turn, a government agency.'"

Don't forget some psyops to get shit shut down that would otherwise be perfectly legal.
The US military pays (and it would be naive to think none of the EU militaries don't) "soldiers" to chat and post shit online...

It isn't just nation states doing this kind of thing. Nor are all the people involved are paid. Even nation states can have "fanboys" (including those with little obvious connection to the state in question.)

So between you, the grandparent, and great-grandparent posts we have everyone covered... reminds me of Kay in Men-in-Black: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

Well, since the flagging is unlikely to be anonymous, that's an easy problem to fix. Just quietly ignore flags from people who cry wolf a lot. Of course, that would make the malware even worse, as anyone who gets infected would be removed from the system until there's essentially no one left in it. This really seems like a completely unworkable idea.

A state-owned 'idiot' list. That's an seriously useful database to have. If I was an employer I'd gladly pay for a copy of that. We could also cut back on their social services payments - if they've got enough free time to sit all day on the Internet then they don't deserve benefit handouts.

You are assuming this project is done with the aim of making it work as honestly as possible.If it's only a shell for a censorship program, giving it the pretense of being driven by people, it's perfectly workable.In other words, the system will radomly filter and accept legitimate censorship requests from joe the public, instead it will always censor the sites that are against powerful interests when said interests express that desire.

Giving them an opportunity to flag anything they disagree with for "governmental review" would result in them flagging just about everything.

Further, there are also the of actions of governments that in lay terms as distinct from legal terms, could be considered terrorism. For example hailing drone strikes on suspected terrorist cells, including innocent civilians in Afghanistan, or Iranian anti-Israel propaganda. Both of these examples are not directly examples of terrorism from a legal perspective, but ei

the only problem is the millions of euros some smart IT dud will charge because the 'project is so vast and complex it will be very hard to etcetera) , it's useless, i'll agree to that but it remains money pit and waste (as usual)

Governments create terrorists only in the sense that gay people create bigots.

I completely agree that the goal here is to create a system to simplify the censoring of unwanted ideas, but let's not pretend that there are not some very real people out there who would and do kill and maim others to spread their way of life.

I hope we can all agree that governments (or more correctly, states) are by far the dominant force that kill and maim people to spread a way of life. Whether they do this to empower the will of their peoples (spreading some regime, religion, etc.) or some ulterior motive is of course debatable. I think it's some mixture of both in all cases.

Some governments might commit acts comparable to terrorism, but the supposedly insightful statement "The point isn't to prevent terrorists. Governments create terrorists." is a load of crap. When was the last time Norway went around killing people? And yet they had a bunch of children massacred all the same.

Terrorists exist independent of governments, and governments do want to prevent terrorist acts. To say otherwise is unbelievable dishonest.

Some governments, e.g. the US and UK, have been caught supporting, funding, even training terrorists. (Including turning a blind eye to them or releasing terrorist suspects from police custody.) Some governments, e.g. France, have been caught carrying out things which cannot be distinguished from those carried out by "terrorists".

If one, by way of a thought experiment, imagines that there existed a corrupt, secular, society ruled by satanic decadence, impious appetite, and foreign policy injustices, could it theoretically be argued that jihad would constitute a duty under certain historically extant strains of abrahamic divine command theories of ethics?

Flag or no flag, team EU?

In all seriousness, this seems like a dreadful idea both on just about every level.

Cultural? I'm trying to think of ways to make more of a mockery of the sort of Enlightenment ideals that Europe managed to produce at one time. I'm having a hard time thinking of one. Yeah, why not build a massive system of sniveling, anonymous censors in order to combat a 'threat' that kills fewer people than seasonal hot/cold snaps by at least an order of magnitude. Good plan there.

Practical? Well, let's see here: As with the relentless 'zOMG Craigslist prostitution!!!' moral panics, what better place for those who wish you harm than shouting about it on the internet? Highly visible, way less anonymous than it feels unless you really do it properly, and comparatively easy to see which fish are biting. You want to drive them away from the venues where your pet geeks can monitor at wire speed and into more clandestine locations where you need to groom human intelligence assets with convincing beards and accents? Dumbass.

Technical? Bots will probably be programmatically flagging things in order to downrank them more or less as enthusiastically as keyword comment spam is currently deployed to uprank things. Never mind the less relentless; but more dangerous and focused, potential for assorted political/commercial/psycho ex/psycho roommate drama.

Legal? Say hello to endless wrangling about what is and isn't 'incitement', most likely with clumsy overreactions against the harmless, clueless, and impolitic, along with free traffic in assorted slang, inuendo, and more or less subtle dog-whistle stuff.

This plan has holes that(where one to be so inclined) a truck bomb could be driven through...

If one, by way of a thought experiment, imagines that there existed a corrupt, secular, society ruled by satanic decadence, impious appetite, and foreign policy injustices, could it theoretically be argued that jihad would constitute a duty under certain historically extant strains of abrahamic divine command theories of ethics?

Christian jihad is exempt from the usual scrutiny. It's only people who dress and act differently than us that are terrorists. Everybody knows that. -_- And all this legislation would do is codify our prejudice into law... today it's terrorism, before that it was communism, before that, fascism... there'll always be an intangible "ism" that we're at war with, and this "ism" will be all the justification our government needs to become an "ism" itself to its people.

People like you are quick to point to a non-existent double standard that allegedly benefits Christianity, ignoring the fact that Christian violence toward Islam has almost always been either in self-defense or irredentist in nature. You ignore the fact that most of the land in the Middle East that is Muslim used to be Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian; Syria, Lebanon and North Africa were predominantly Christian when conquered and forcefully converted by the Muslim Caliphate. Two hundred some years prior to

No, you are right, it was not a jihad, it was missionaries backed by colonizing armies. The Christian imperial nations colonized far more land than the Muslims ever did - including said Muslim countries. When Spanish soldiers went out into cities to test their newly sharpened swords on the local population in South America, it was all in fun, not a jihad. So yeah, there hasn't been a Christian jihad, because they called slaughtering the natives something else.

The very reason they went to explore was to find an efficient trade route to India. Once they realized it wasn't India, they returned to gain new land and gold. It was imperialism, plain and simple.

The Spanish hardly conquered the Aztecs on their own strength. Do you really think 500 white guys with 15th and early 16th century muskets defeated the over 100,000 strong Aztech imperial army on their own strength and with the aid of Smallpox? Bullshit. When they marched into Tenochtitlan, they did so at the hea

People like you are quick to point to a non-existent double standard that allegedly benefits Christianity, ignoring the fact that Christian violence toward Islam has almost always been either in self-defense or irredentist in nature.

So the four crusades, 10 year war, etc., -- all self defense, right? Christianity has a long and bloody history.

The point isn't to DO anything constructive. DOING THINGS takes work, determination, money, and (above all) persistence and courage - all things anathema to modern political leadership.

This is another example of 'security theater' - most famously practiced by US DoHS in airports. Minimal/no actual increase in security, but a clear and visible example of government "doing something", which can also conveniently be used to funnel $billions in public funds to political

“So why not try and create a database where internet companies can check it to see if it's known illegal material? There are many known YouTube videos, for example, with content like be-headings. You don’t need to watch them to know if they are illegal or not.”

So what is the answer? Is a beheading video illegal? Why? What is the law that makes a beheading video illegal? What happens if it's legal in one country, but not in another? Does this magic content filter know where a user is watching content? Is it illegal if it's in a depiction of a beheading from a movie? How about if I stage a fake beheading of my own in my back yard, but I claim it's real, is that illegal? Likewise, what if I post a beheading and claim it's fake.... but it's so well done, no one knows if it's fake or not. Is that illegal?

(I'm ignoring the obvious questions like, what happens if my movie promo with a fake beheading gets flagged as illegal (even if it's not), and now suddenly it's banned from the internet and I can no longer show my promo)

(I'm ignoring the obvious questions like, what happens if my movie promo with a fake beheading gets flagged as illegal (even if it's not), and now suddenly it's banned from the internet and I can no longer show my promo)

If your promo is banned you could probably expect that the potential audience for your movie has increased by a couple of orders of magnitude. Which is what usually happens when a movie (or record) is banned. If your movie is very bad people might suspect that the ban was deliberate on you

So what is the answer? Is a beheading video illegal? Why? What is the law that makes a beheading video illegal? What happens if it's legal in one country, but not in another?

The idiots behind this project explicitly don't care about the legality of censoring the web, or any accountability of their decisions. From the Clean IT project website [cleanitproject.eu]:

The main objective of this project is to develop a non-legislative framework that consists of general principles and best practices. The general principles will be developed through a bottom up process where the private sector will be in the lead. Through a series of workshops and conferences, the private and public sector will define their problems and try to draw up principles. These principles can be used as a guideline or gentlemen’s agreement, and can be adopted by many partners. They will describe responsibilities and concrete steps public and private partners can take to counter the illegal use of Internet.

In the current economic crisis they really do not have anything better to do than create proposals which we know will not work, will not address the root causes of terrorism (which really is a negligible issue within the EU anyway) and which will add costs to IT companies? Way to get your priorities wrong.

The European Commission is the biggest mistake in the whole EU structure; unelected, not accountable and downright underhanded when dealing with legitimate opposition from the at least democratically elect

Thankfully, we will be able to realize considerable savings, since the scheme is so draconian that we can probably just purchase a Great Firewall implementation from the Chinese at everyday low prices...

Yeah. Some how I don't see that working, been paying attention to the bond markets? Germany was -0.0055 the other day. That's people paying the government to take money at a loss as a 'safe haven' for 10 years. -0.0022 for 5 year. I expect it to hit -1% around the 18th of the month depending on how the greek voting goes.

Roughly half of the eurozone is underwater with debt at 150-200% of their GDP. And unemployment, the by-country stats not the EU normalized stats give between 18-55% unemployment rate

"Among those 13 courses of action is a proposal for a system that will allow users to `flag' content they believe to be illegal when surfing the web. These alarms would be sent for review to the service provider and in turn, a government agency."

And will the people doing this flagging be trained to know what is and what isn't illegal content? Didn't think so. I don't think the proponent of this idea has thought enough about the unintended consequences of such a capability.

While you are remembering that, also remember that getting extradited from country X to country Y for something that you did while being a citizen and residing in X is a distinct possibility these days. Of course, it's only true for one particular country Y, and a somewhat limited set of Xs (for now), but even so.

"Internet users could contribute to an official blacklist of suspected communist content under a budding 'Clean IT' project, backed by the House Un-American Activities Committee . Participating representatives are putting together 13 proposals in a text that commits web hosts, search engines and ISPs to helping to weed out content that incites or advocates communism. From the article: 'Among those 13 courses of action is a proposal for a system that will allow users to "flag" content they believe to be communist when surfing the web. These alarms would be sent for review to the service provider and in turn, a government agency.'"

So we shoud submit stuxnet and flame? That is THE definition of terrorist content that executes actions -- far more dangerous than the simple free exchange of ideas, even if offensive or morally wrong.

Some Germans (me is one, however, I am not elegible I guess) should be especially qualified for this job.

Reminds me of my youth when my mother tended only to whisper fearing that someone could hear what was being talked about (During the 'Drittes Reich' a person with the fuction of 'Blockwart' was installed for every apartment building, spying on the renters.)

Let's see, there's the bible, then the koran and all other forms of aggressive, conservative proselytizing religions including BTW scientology... then there's the right wing parties such as the nazis and the klan...oh and climate change deniers...

But this would amount to a form of leaving these
people alone amongst themselves. Isn't sunshine , mockery, debate, parody and shaming the best antiseptic in these cases?